Continuation of activities on the implementation of the national stablecoin pilot project
26/07/2023
With a view to continuing activities on the implementation of the national stablecoin pilot project, i.e. central bank digital currency (CBDC) in Montenegro, representatives of the American company Ripple visited Montenegro on 25 - 26 July this year.
As a part of the visit, Ripple experts gave two educational workshops on Asset tokenization and Web3 finance (programmability) for representatives of the financial service providers, government institutions, private IT sector, and the academic community. These workshops mark the completion of a series of educational events organized by the CBCG and Ripple, through which participants have had the opportunity to learn about the blockchain technology and its possibilities.
In addition to the workshops, the experts held several working meetings with representatives of various interested groups with a view to exchanging ideas and defining the lists of potential candidates, i.e. “use cases” for testing the stablecoin in Montenegro.
The main objective of the pilot project is for the Montenegrin administration as well as the general public to expand their knowledge and gain a hand-on experience in the application of this type of digital currency, as well as to learn more about its possibilities, but also of its inherent risks, especially in the context of its impact on the applicable regulations, cybersecurity and/or the protection of the rights and privacy of end users.
By participating in such activities, Montenegro has joined a large group of central banks around the world (93%) which, according to the recent BIS report for 2022i, have already engaged in some form of CBDC testing, while more than half of them have also been conducting actual experiments or working on pilot programs.
iResults of the 2022 BIS survey on central bank digital currencies and crypto: https://www.bis.org/publ/bppdf/bispap136.htm.
